


30 Day NoT4

by nimblermortal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-13 13:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 10,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4524510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm just busy and need to keep my hand in with something not stressful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Godwin Frame Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something to make sense of what follows. Or maybe not. It's been a while, had a change of setting, and I haven't reread it in a while.

A Biography of Maeve Porta

by Remus Godwin

 

Remus stopped and looked at his title. It was a good title. Ambitious. The cursor blinked at him from below it, taunting him with the knowledge that he had no idea what to put under it. A biography. He needed sources. Where did he go to find information about Maeve Porta? Any child in the street could tell him enough to fill a chapter, at least, but people did not want to know what any child in the street knew. They wanted a special glimpse into her real life, a personal acquaintance, a secret if one could be found, though of course Maeve had outlawed scandals ?years ago. Where did he go for private information about Maeve? Who knew her personally? Who knew where she had been born?

Remus smiled and packed his things back in their bag, his document blinking spitefully at him even as he did so. He had a journey to make.

 

Remus set the recorder on the table and sat back in his chair. “Mr. Porta,” he said. “What do you have to say about your wife?”

“I told you to go away,” Porta said. He wasn’t even looking at Remus; he was crouched by the carcass of an ancient computer. “I told you to go away fourteen times.”

“And yet I am still here,” said Remus, who had taken Porta’s failure to use any stronger method as permission to remain. At the very least he might have called the guards; at most, he could have done any of the things that made politicians cower when Porta entered the room. Remus didn’t know if anyone knew what those things were, and belatedly he thought it may have been a better idea to write a biography of Mr. Porta.

“I don’t want to talk to you. Go find someone who likes to talk,” Porta said.

“Mr. Porta, I honestly believe you are the only person in the world who can give me this information,” Remus said.

“That’s true of a lot of things,” Porta said. He stood up and bumped his head on the table. “Ow!”

“Why are you working on that antiquated machine?” Remus asked.

“I can make it do any number of things your modern computers can’t do,” Porta said. “If I needed something faster, I’d build it myself.” He gestured behind him, to the darker areas of his greenhouse where things quietly whirred.

“Would you like to tell me more about your work?” Remus asked, leaning so that he could peer into the darkness. It was said that Porta’s work was light-sensitive, but he opened the windows to sunlight every few days.

“No,” said Porta. “What is it you want to know, Journalist?”

“I would like to start with Mrs. Porta’s early life, if I may,” Remus said humbly, now he had Porta’s attention. “She seems to have sprung from nowhere.”

“Yes. She did, a bit. So did we all.”

“Most of us are aware who our parents are, at least.”

“Some of us even care. Really, Journalist, why do you want to know such trivial data?”

“Mr. Porta, it is not me asking,” said Remus, leaning forward. “The world wants to know.”

“If the world needed to know, Maeve would tell it,” Porta said. “Then she would tell it what to do. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Is it confidential, then?” Remus asked, disappointed. Confidential was a rare marking, and an unassailable one. It was like discovering a scandal.

“No,” said Porta, “it’s just that no one cares.”

“I care,” said Remus. Porta stopped looking at his machines for a moment and considered him.

“To you, this is a science of sorts,” he said. “A quest for knowledge, which you will record for all mankind.”

“Yes!” said Porta eagerly.

“I resolved long ago that to tell mankind of my discoveries would be to quash its scientific spirit,” Porta said, half to himself. “Since that is what I appear to be aiming to protect, it would be contradictory to crush investigation here. Very well. I will give you half an hour while I have lunch.”

“Half an hour!” Remus said, not sure if he was delighted or dismayed.

“Just so,” said Porta. He crossed to the window by the door, alone unmasked from the sun, in the light of which Remus was sitting. Under it was a sink and a small stack of plates reaching perhaps half way to the bottom of the window. He reached for the cabinet under the sink, which turned out to be a cupboard containing a stack of plates identical to the one under the window except that they appeared to be clean. Under the counter was a refrigerator. Porta spooned a lump of something that looked like mashed turnips onto the plate and returned to the table.

“That looks terrible,” said Remus.

“I invented it,” said Porta. “It allows me to finish my lunch in half an hour.”

“Is it as awful as it looks?”

“Not to me. What is it you wanted to ask?”

“Ah!” Remus fumbled for the recorder switch. “Where and to whom was Maeve Porta born?”

“India. I don’t know her parents’ names. Not Porta; she made that up.”

“India? She hardly looks Indian.”

“Immigration,” said Porta.

“Ah,” said Remus. “And where in India was she born?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did she spend her childhood?”

“I don’t know.”

“In all your married years, you have not heard a word about Mrs. Porta’s past?”

“I’m not interested, and fortunately I don’t see much of her.”

“Is that an admission of marital tension?” Remus asked. It was not a scandal, but people would be interested if such an established relationship were dissolving.

“It was always political. We’re only still married because it’s too much of a bother to get a divorce,” Porta said. “I consider my time valuable and private, Mr. Godwin. Getting married took me away from my studies for too long, but Maeve insisted.”

“Did she, then, see a non-political benefit to your relationship?”

“No.”

“Mr. Porta, I can assure you this process will be easier and more efficient if you volunteer information.”

“Not like science at all,” Porta said. “No, it was only that Maeve’s associates of the time refused to accept her as a single person, and she required a spouse who would not come with political obligation and yet would not denigrate her station. As she is Maeve, she also required it be someone useful to her. Of the three of us, I was the remaining option.”

“And who were your competitors?”

“My team members,” Porta corrected. “Associates is probably a better word for them.”

“Would you name them for me please?”

“Maeve Porta,” Porta said, to be difficult. “Luigi who would become Porta.” It was well known that Mr. Porta never used whatever name he had had before he became Maeve’s husband. “Arturo Hernandez.” This too was unsurprising; Hernandez, more commonly Art, had been known to be Maeve’s most reliable supporter. It was not known that he had been a competitor for the role as her consort; Remus wondered how strong that competition truly was. “Raphael.”

“Surname?”

“Everyone knows Raphael,” Porta said. He paused, but did not bother to watch Remus’s face change, though surely he had intentionally created this moment of drama.

“ _Raphael_ is an - an associate of Maeve’s? A supporter, as Art was?”

“Someone tried to put us on a team, anyway.”

“Someone put Raphael, Art, Maeve, and yourself on a team? Just what team was this?”

“It belonged to Unsi,” said Porta. Remus realized that he was the only one of the group who used his surname, and wondered if he meant to or if he had never bothered to correct anyone. “United Nations Special Intervention. You will not remember the UN.”

“I did learn my history. It was a union of nations, idealistically conceived but lacking the power to enforce its rulings.”

“It was attempting to give itself that power in a similarly idealistic way. A small number of agents without ties to any one country would be trained for quick, effective interventions to change the actions of a country and thereby bring about world peace and prosperity.”

“I assume it succeeded,” Remus said, gesturing vaguely out the window at the world.

“No,” said Porta. “It failed miserably, and we were its worst failure. But I suppose it united Maeve and Art, and you know how effective that was.”

“And yourself,” said Remus.

“I have done my best to have no effect on the world.”

“And yet dignitaries tremble whenever you appear at a social function.”

“They tremble at anything out of the ordinary, and I only appear when Maeve’s nagging interferes with my work.”

“There are rumors...” Remus said invitingly.

“I don’t listen to people.”

“You say Raphael was part of this team as well,” Remus said. “Can I take this to mean he has acted at Maeve’s bequest?”

“Mr. Godwin. You speak as though this arrangement was a team.”

“That is the word you used.”

“Ironically, I thought. Tell me, Mr. Godwin, is it a team when all members pull in contrasting directions? Maeve and Art were as close to a team as we came: Maeve ordered, Art did. Raphael and I stayed out of Maeve’s way and escaped her when we could.”

“You married her.”

“In exchange for her leaving me alone.”

“So she does not leave Raphael alone.”

“Much good though it does her.” Porta glanced at the time. Remus did as well.

“Then Raphael has acted at her bidding?”

“She nags him. How well do you think Raphael responds to nagging?”

“The attention of Madame Porta...”

“What does Raphael care for celebrity?”

Remus had to admit that the man’s judgments seemed to suggest a complete disregard for position, except his own. He conferred celebrity upon himself and had quite cheerfully admitted to any number of papers that his decision to serve as an elected officer - running for the position, to a man of his peculiar nature, was a formality - had been made because he wanted to earn the ‘dignified statesman’ look he was beginning to develop. Remus couldn’t say he cared for the man. Of course, it was said that many had met him feeling just so and had come away singing his praises.

“He might want to tumble it,” Remus suggested awkwardly.

“Just so. You could as well say that Maeve does Raphael’s bidding. She did, after all, ban scandals.”

“But Raphael loves scandals.”

“So he has often said. I have lived with the man for several unhappy years, and I can tell you that he is rarely the same person for any two people he meets. Any persisting desire or spirit of goodwill, is entirely subconscious. But you did not come here to ask me about Raphael, and your time is nearly up.”

“Ah. Yes. Er. You say Maeve simply appeared at UNSI, and you can say nothing more about her origin?”

“Yes.”

“How certain are you that she is, in fact, Indian?”

“She told me so.” Porta stared evenly at Remus, as though daring him to suggest that Maeve lied. Remus knew that she did not lie often, though she had no hesitation if it would serve her ends. He could not, however, see how admitting to her husband that she came from a particular country could influence her plans. “That is also where she went to exact revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Something trivial. I didn’t ask. Once she realized it would interfere with her other possibilities, she gave it up. Your time has passed.” Luigi stood and placed his now empty plate on the stack by the sink.

“You will tell me the rest of this story?” Remus asked.

“If I must.”

“If it would be more agreeable to you, you could write it down and send it to me,” Remus suggested. “I would require a signed statement...”

“Talking is faster,” Porta agreed reluctantly. “I will send you notice of times that will not interfere with my experiments.”

“Thank you, Mr. Porta.”

Porta did not answer. He was looking longingly toward the recesses of his greenhouse and pointedly at the door. Remus lingered, so he turned toward his greenhouse and his work.

“One last thing, Mr. Porta!” Remus said, giving up on any hope of Porta’s inviting him to speak. “How should I refer to you in this manuscript? It is customary to address your, ah, former associates by their first names.”

“I suppose you should use the name they refer to me by. Linguini.”

“ _Linguini?_ ”

“Ask Raphael,” was Porta’s tired response.

 

“Tell me more about Raphael. I am to meet him tomorrow.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Oh - tell me about his insistence that Maeve ban scandals.”

“He never said a word about it. But they would have ended soon anyway. People were getting bored.”

“Getting bored? Scandal entertained people for millennia before Maeve banned it.”

“It’s no fun when the answer is always, ‘Raphael did it and is unapologetic’. The laws of the tabloids stated that ‘Celebrity sleeps with governor _and_ chamber maid together’ has a higher priority than ‘Minor hereditary official has battle with gout’. Yet those laws demanded that every headline begin with the word ‘Raphael’ and feature an interview. Repetition breeds boredom and contempt. Changing the laws would either have created a new form of scandal that Raphael would adopt with just as much enthusiasm, or necessarily have eliminated it entirely.”

“And why did Raphael do this?”

“You want me to say he secretly has deep philosophical views on human goodness and innate ideas of privacy? No, not Raphael. I would take him exactly as he appears to you: superficial and self-absorbed. And, of course, the most wonderful and remarkable person you’ll ever meet, in his way.”

“You approve of him?”

“I endeavor to remain accurate in my description of how Raphael will appear to you.”

“I can’t say that I approve of his -”

“Mr. Godwin, whatever you think of Raphael now, I assure you, when you meet him you will adore him. It is his one great skill, and I know of only two people who have evaded it.”

“Yourself and Madame Porta.”

“Myself and Art,” Linguini said. “Even Maeve is, I think, rather fond of him.”

“Really.”

“He hasn’t slept with her. No, Maeve is fond of him because of what he has done for her and, if he is at work to make her so, because he has found a way of appearing reluctant, not worth bothering, and singularly helpful all at the same time.

“Have you slept with him?”

“None of us have.”

“Art as well, then?”

“Art despised everyone except Maeve. ...

 

Remus goes to Raphael and talks with him for a bit. He mentions how he misses scandals and then says, “Luigi Yportna told me you may have intended for scandals to be banned.”

“Luigi... Yportna?” Raphael asked, looking blank.

“Yes.” Remus waited for the name to sink in. When it didn’t, he added, “He said I should call him Linguini.”

“Oh, _Linguini!_ ” Raphael said, his face bursting with recognition, and then with disappointment, as though he had expected Remus to remind him of someone more interesting or prettier. “Yes, well, what did he say?”

“That you intended for scandals to be banned.”

“That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows the two things I like best are sex and attention. Why on Earth would I want the two to be separated?”

Remus looked at him and his brain flashed, a leap of insight, that perhaps Raphael did not like attention, he merely wanted to be left alone, but the world had never allowed him such a relief. Perhaps Raphael was a tired, tortured soul, wanting only a bit of rest in the world...

“Maybe,” he said, “there’s one of the two that you don’t want.”

Raphael looked puzzled. “You mean attention,” he said, and then he started laughing. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear, me, no! Never in my life. Here, let me tell you a story.”

 


	2. The Godwin Frame Story

“You two are idiots,” Linguini declared, his eyes only barely flickering over the top of his book. “And you realize Raphael is never going to shut up when he finds you doing this?”

Art, predictably, grunted in reply. Maeve did not dignify him with a response either. Linguini did not seem to have expected one, because he simply flipped a pen over his fingers and scribbled into the middle of the book.

“You’re going to run out of margin eventually,” Maeve told him. Her eyes also did not leave the subject of her study, though in her case that was Art, their gazes locked over their clenched hands, neither yet prepared to give an inch.

“I’m only correcting the egregious errors. I’m no Fermat.”

“Why do you even care what Raphael thinks?” Art asked. “No one cares what Raphael thinks. He’s an idiot child.”

Maeve’s eyebrows moved a centimeter. Art, taking this as a challenge of his strength rather than his hypocrisy, frowned and pressed. Their hands wavered, and Maeve’s jaw locked.

“That is patently false, Art. You could at least try to evaluate your opponents correctly, if you can’t get anything else right. Everyone except us cares what Raphael thinks. It’s the only thing that unites us.” Linguini stuck out his tongue as he circled something that required some extra manual dexterity. Had she seen, Maeve would have rolled her eyes at him.

“If you want me to beat you at something,” Art began.

“I hope you realize he’s humoring you,” Linguini told Maeve. “The moment he decides to win, it’ll be over.”

“I hope you realize he’s baiting you,” Maeve said. “It’s Linguini’s special wording for ‘can’t even beat a little girl?’”

“Remind me who’s baiting who,” Art said, “and when the beating can begin.”

“Oh, yes, you’re good at those.” Linguini snapped his book shut and stood up just as the door handle rattled. Maeve sighed.

“He’s uncannily good at that - hey!” Their hands had abruptly hit the table. Art pushed his chair back and stood up. “That was cheating, I was distracted!”

“Then don’t be distracted,” Art said.

“Did I miss something?” Raphael drawled as he came in, toeing off his ridiculous shoes. Everything about Raphael was ridiculous, until he spoke to you, at which point it all made sense and was wonderful. “Were you two arm wrestling again? Maeve, you’re never going to win, look at him. Something has crept through his body, devoured his bones and skin, and excreted them back in the parasitic waste that is muscle.”

“Always nice to hear your opinion,” Art grunted.

“Well, don’t let me stop you. One of you just won. Emrys would want you to make up.” Raphael came and stood arms akimbo almost between them. “Go on, shake hands, pat backs, do your hypermasculine displays of affection.”

Art’s hand shot out and pushed Raphael over. There wasn’t another word spoken until he had left the room. By then Raphael had managed to stand up, check to make sure whatever precious delicate thing he was wearing wasn’t damaged, and start whining.

“It’s your own fault,” Maeve said. “You barely even knew Emrys.”

“We’re keeping up the charade that he isn’t dead, right?” Raphael demanded. “Someone might have been watching through the window.”

“Only because you’re here,” Maeve snapped, and stalked off as well, leaving Raphael in his least favorite place: alone.

“Three people in all the world don’t like me, and I live with all of them,” Raphael muttered. “Surely there’s something to eat around here, anyway.”


	3. Cuddling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cuddling. It's a Raphael chapter, of course I had fun.

“I have to go,” Raphael announced, as much as one could announce in a drawl and sprawled across what could only be described as a public-access boudoir. There was a rather unanimous, if lazy, cry of dismay.

“Why?” someone thought to ask.

“I have to be home in time for dinner.”

“Bit late for that, then.”

“Is it already? But really, I have to get home. My wardma - ward-master would be terribly upset if I were not home in time for...” He gestured languidly. “Whenever my curfew is.”

It did, of course, generate the laughter he had been searching for, and distract from his slip of the tongue.

“You don’t have to go home, though. What is there for you there? We could feed you your dinner.”

“Already have, in fact.”

“Peace, peace, children,” Raphael said, which drew more laughter since he was the only child there. “I’m a legal minor, I can’t just run away. And you don’t want to see what happens when a ward-master comes after his lost charge.”

The real joke was lost on them, as none of them were aware that Emrys had been dead for several years already. The only retribution Raphael really had to fear was Maeve’s; she had certain ideas about how things ought to be done.

“What happens?”

“My dear madam,” Raphael said, “you’ve already heard tales of my wardmates’ exploits. You wouldn’t want them coming after me. Now how would you feel about being pursued by the man who keeps them in line?”

There was a long silence. No one quite wanted to be the one who suggested he write Master Emrys a note, and the thought of bringing up who he may have answered to before was no longer as entertaining.

“I’ll be on my way, then,” Raphael said, slithering his way out of the pile of bodies with a practiced dexterity. Freed from the tangle of limbs, he was clearly only two thirds the size of anyone else there, perhaps thirteen years old, and transitioning elegantly from charming, chubby-cheeked child to lithe teenager on the brink of staggering beauty. Apparently unaware of this, he glanced down the lines of his own body with some dismay.

“He’s frightfully cruel to me,” he muttered. “I’m growing  _muscles_. I won’t fit in my own coat much longer. And worse, they don’t fit my figure.”

None of this seemed to be true to anyone watching, but they accepted it long enough to watch him walk out the door, before pulling apart as if they were magnets that someone had abruptly twisted to the repellent poles.

“Well. Same time next week, then?” someone muttered, and they all disappeared, following Raphael’s footsteps with a shamefacedness that he had not yet discovered.

\---

“He’s on his way,” Linguini reported. “Would you get out of my room, Maeve?”

"He’ll be late,” Maeve said. “The trams don’t run this late.”

“Someone will offer him a ride. They always do.”

“You seem amused.”

“Raphael was telling rather a funny joke.” Linguini gestured sharply at the screen.

“ _Raphael?”_  Maeve asked, as if the concept of Raphael’s contributing anything to a conversation, least of all a joke, was unthinkable.

“It had layers,” Linguini said. “It was just the old Emrys rehash, but he was making them laugh at something else. He’s growing up.”

“He’ll always be a baby,” Maeve said dismissively. “He’ll never learn responsibility, independence, how to look after himself -”

“He won’t have to. Your world isn’t his.” Linguini turned back to his screens, and whatever he had been scribbling before she came in; it was in some script Maeve did not know, which was impressive given the number of languages she spoke. “For example, no one would offer you a ride home. Now get out.”

It was not a request this time. Maeve left; it was better not to push her wardmates, even the ones who did not at first appear to have any power.

On that note, she didn’t say a word to Raphael about arriving home three minutes after his curfew.


	4. Gaming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm playing a game with myself with this one: Guess Who's Narrating.

Linguini was the only one of us who ever gamed.

It was just like him. Rather than do something useful, you’d find him hunched over some console when you came home, the room dark, his eyes glowing with a hue eerily similar to that of the screen he squinted at, thumbs pounding away at tiny plastic buttons.

He persuaded me to play with him once, but I could never figure out what his objective was. It had nothing to do with what the game professed to ask of him; he wandered past the clearly marked goal and poked his nose into random corners, his fingers moving furiously as the pixels indicating his unit ran stubbornly into walls. When I tried to forward the game, he shouted at me, but he could never clarify what it was he wanted done.

I gave up. Linguini, fragile then and at least short enough for it to be expected of him, hardly seemed to notice, chugging thoroughly away at his self-assigned task.

And one day I came home and he was not there. The consoles had disappeared, and he hardly seemed to notice their absence. Reminded of them, he looked blank, then said he’d accomplished his objective. When pressed, he said he had been trying to make the computer do things it wasn’t supposed to from inside the games themselves. Whether he had succeeded was unclear; whatever the case, he never asked after them again, and Emrys cleared them out of some dusty closet years later as a sort of helpless tenth birthday present.

Linguini hardly seemed to notice. He could be difficult to impress, and he never said what he was thinking.


	5. On a date

"You'll be pleased to note that I have identified your actions as non-military in nature," Art informed his date, passing her a caramel latte.

“Excuse me?”

“You have to admit they were suspicious. For a while I thought you were hanging around my training routines either to find my weaknesses or to copy them for training your own force, but in the end that didn’t seem right.”

“I think you’re overestimating me,” the girl said dryly. “Tell me, whatever gave me away?”

“Marked uptick in interest whenever I took my shirt off,” Art said. “I’m sorry, perhaps I should have begun with introductions, but obviously you already know my name, and of course I already know that you are giving yours as Alex despite how far it is from your given name. If you throw your drink at me, I will be forced to take hostile action.”

“Well I’m sorry if that sounds a little too stalker for my peace of mind!”

“Says the girl who’s been watching my every non-military action,” Art said. “I told you, I thought you might be an enemy agent. I used what resources I had.”

“You were nervous,” the girl said slowly. “You’re still nervous.”

“Cautious,” Art suggested. He set his own coffee cup down on the table so that he could pull a chair back for her, moving them carefully into non-hostile positions. “I’m still gathering intel. Here is my plan for the afternoon: We sit and you answer my questions, and afterward we do all the usual date things. I understand long walks on the beach are in order, and while that would ordinarily be hard to do where we are, I am prepared to charter a plane.”

“Right,” said Alex, slowly taking her seat. She slid the coffee cup across the table, a few centimeters one way and then back the other. “So - this isn’t a date, it’s an interrogation, but you’re willing to play rich boyfriend and fly me to the beach if it goes well?”

“It’s not my plane. I have access to military resources.”

“You’re willing to  _coopt military resources_ to fly me to the beach if it goes well?”

“I need to understand what every player on the field is targeting,” Art said. He leaned back in his own chair, his posture starting to open toward her, no longer holding the coffee cup like a barrier between them. “I need to know where they’re positioned and where they’ll break.”

“You know,” said Alex, “you’ve got an amazing figure, but your personality wears thin pretty quickly.”

“I’m nervous,” said Art with a thin smile.

“So what exactly are these questions you mean to ask me?”

“As a representative of - all right, as a statistically representative member of the group monitoring my activities - what’s so interesting about me taking my shirt off?”

“You don’t  _know?”_

 _“_ I’m no Raphael.”

Alex shrugged that off as a fairly common figure of speech in several languages. “You’re pretty damn beautiful and a pleasure to watch. Next question.”

“If you’re that interested in the functionality of my body, why don’t you cultivate your own?”

It was going to be a long date. Alex settled into her chair and resigned herself to using small words, and getting at least some sort of baked good out of him as well. She hardly thought he was serious about the plane thing.

What she didn’t know was that Art never lied about anything.


	6. Kissing

“It’s bad luck to see the bride before the ceremony,” Maeve said.

“I’m sorry, are you living out some sort of adolescent fantasy I wasn’t aware of?” Linguini demanded. “Who’re all those people outside?”

“Guests? Like one has at a wedding?”

“You are having some sort of idiotic fantasy, aren’t you.”

Maeve finished adjusting the tilt of her veil and turned to him. “They’re important dignitaries who are all young enough to remember that they were invited to my wedding for decades to come,” she informed him. “People who will verify that yes, in point of fact, I am married.”

“Well, you’re the one who has to pass this off for those decades to come,” Linguini said.

“Just remember your part.”

“Smile, nod, say 'I do' in the right places,” Linguini agreed. “Exactly what are those places going to have me agreeing to?”

“They’re vacuous,” Maeve assured him. “I had my best lawyer-poet go over them. Exactly the terms we agreed on: you show up in a suit every so often to confirm you’re still alive, I don’t bother you in your lab for any problem anyone else could conceivably solve, and if you die before I do I make sure your body is cremated before anyone can pick it apart for science. You’re awfully proud of that brain of yours, aren’t you?”

“It’s useful,” Linguini said, picking up a bottle of hair spray and turning it over in his hands.

“Well, put it to the task of figuring out how to kiss me without discomfiting either of us.”

Linguini froze. Maeve plucked the hair spray out of his hand. “You didn’t say a word about kissing.”

“It’s one kiss, it’s expected,” she said. “Turn your nose to the side and mash our faces together, I don’t care. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, just acceptable.”

“Much like you,” Linguini agreed. Maeve huffed. “What, did you want to be beautiful on your wedding day? Everyone’s going to be thinking it: not even a perfectly tailored wedding dress can make that woman look good. You’re a toad in taffeta.”

“It’s tulle,” Maeve said, shoving him at the door, “and speak for yourself. Now keep your mind on the business at hand and you can still get some samples diluted or whatever it is you do by the end of the day.”

“I can try,” Linguini said. “No reception.”

“A very private reception, family only,” Maeve promised. Linguini raised his eyebrows and she nodded.

“Acceptable,” he agreed, and left. Finally.

It was a beautiful ceremony. Maeve had people with eyes for such things, and they had made sure that everything that hung hung exactly correctly, and whatever else went into planning a wedding. Maeve had not bothered much with the details, although she listened to every word of the vows, and to Linguini’s slightly-more-than-disinterested “I do”. She would have thought he was paying no attention except that he swooped in at “kiss the bride” and nearly bent her over backward trying to plant a kiss on her - an actual kiss, she noted, though he clearly had no idea how to go about it.

“Try that again and I’ll hit you, dress or no,” she muttered into the corner of his mouth.

“No fear,” he said, and backed away. “Are we done?”

“Walk me to the escape vehicle and we won’t have to see each other until the honeymoon.”

She could feel him tense, and was glad for it; she could almost feel his teeth gritting.

“All in the vows,  _dear_. Or weren’t you listening?”

“I have a thousand better things to do and not a one of them breathes,” he said. He was probably thinking about how unnecessary it was for her to continue breathing.

“Just smile for the cameras. I won’t keep you long.”


	7. Wearing each other's clothes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raphael's not very old at this point - he's still at the point where he might get a bit defensive about people Implying Things about him, as opposed to when he comes into his own and his response is more, "Scandal? Where? I want in!"

“You cannot leave my house wearing that,” Raphael declared.

“It’s what I came in,” Art said. Admittedly there wasn’t much of it left, but it had done its job in the field, and it was probably regretting the lingering feeling of duty that led him to stop by Raphael’s place on his way home as much as he was.

“It’s indecent!”

Art said nothing, his silence lingering over the edges of what he thought of Raphael’s wardrobe. Raphael blithely ignored him.

“Whatever, I’ll find you something. I’m sure someone left something in your size. Monstrous as it is.”

“People often leave your house wearing less than they came in with?”

“I’m sorry,” Raphael said, “Are you slut-shaming me?  _You?_ The man who’s trying to wander the streets in two strips of cloth and sixteen ounces of blood and paint thinner?”

Art shrugged. Raphael went back to ignoring him and digging through cupboards, trying to find clothes that did not belong to him. This seemed to be quite the challenge, as despite the vast quantity of clothes he went through, all of them seemed to belong to him.

“This is  _terrible,_ ” Raphael lamented. “

“I could just go home as I am,” Art pointed out.

“No, you can’t. It’s a matter of honor; you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m the one without honor?” Art asked, his temper rising. Raphael just kept talking over him, and Art bit his tongue remembering that Raphael was no longer his charge to cuff when he got out of line, and he was a guest in Raphael’s house.

“You really can’t wear my things; they’d stretch across you like spandex over a superhero. I think anything of mine would go transparent pulled across your chest. You’d look like one of my  _floozies,_ wouldn’t you? And you’d never stand for that. You have  _proprieties._ ”

“I really don’t,” Art said.

“That’s obvious just looking at you.” Raphael stomped his foot. “There’s really nothing. It’s laundry day, isn’t it?”

Art, trying to decide between pointing out the vast quantities of clothes Raphael had already been through and reminding Raphael, again, that there was no reason he couldn’t go home in what he was currently wearing, remained silent. If he was any judge, Raphael would make a noise like a wounded dinosaur and then sulk like a three-year-old for the rest of the day -

“Fine,” Raphael concluded, and stalked back to the first closet he’d opened. He probably would have thrown things at Art dramatically if he hadn’t been in the habit of taking better care of his clothes than that. “Take that. And this. And  _wash_ yourself first. And wash them again before you give them back. Or better, never give them back, I can get new clothes.”

“I believe you.”

“Oh, shut up and get dressed. And don’t tell me when you’re leaving, I don’t want to even imagine what you’re going to look like.” Raphael turned on a heel and disappeared behind one of the many doors in his house, half of which seemed to be closets. Art looked around, shrugged, and, since he hadn’t been shown where the bathroom was, stripped down where he was and brushed the worst of the blood off on the rags in his hand.

He probably did look a sight, later, smeared in blood and wearing the... garments... Raphael had offered him, all of them several sizes too small, and carrying a wad of gory rags in one hand. His boots definitely did not match the clothes, even to the vague extent that Art’s clothes ever matched. They weren’t sheer enough, and there were far too few sequins involved. Everything of Raphael’s seemed to have sequins somewhere.

He had caught Raphael not long before he went to bed, and so the sun was rising dimly as he neared his base. Not many people were about, but Art caught a glimpse of someone who might have been a baker, or perhaps just fetching the family breakfast. On a whim, he stopped her and asked if she had a phone on her person.

“Sure,” she said, slipping a hand into a pocket where Art was quite, quite sure she kept nothing even close to the functionality of a phone.

“Do me a favor and take a picture of me?” he asked, spreading his arms.

“Why should I?”

“I need you to send it to Raphael. It’s in your best interest; it’ll get you into his presence.”

“Raphael who?”

“Oh, don’t be coy. Everyone knows Raphael. Are you going to do it, or do I ask someone else?”

He watched her glance up and down the empty street. At last, carefully, she set down the bakery bags and pulled a phone out of one bag, still keeping one hand in the pocket that certainly held either a knife or some sort of terrible acid.

“There,” she said as the light flashed. “You want to see it?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Just make sure Raphael sees it.” He headed off down the road, leaving her room to be less afraid of him.

“You’re crazy,” she called.

“That’s all right,” he said. She’d find out when the picture hit the internet a few days later.

He’d find out much sooner, when Raphael called to leave obscenities all over his voice mail. Art chuckled to himself in his own comfortable, blood-covered dawn and went home to wash up. Someone could wear these clothes again, even if Raphael refused to on principle.


	8. Cosplay

“You know, revenge pranking is not very original,” said Alex. She had been called in as a consultant on account of once having had a crush on Art, and therefore having paid a great deal of attention to his lines.

“When you’re this beautiful, you don’t have to be original,” Raphael said. “Besides, I am Beauty. I am Grace. I am Art.”

“You’re not safe for work, is what you are,” Alex said. Raphael grinned and considered pinching her bottom, but refrained from doing so. So far, their relationship was strictly professional, and he was enjoying the novelty. “Where did you even get the idea for this costume?”

“It arrived on my doorstep in the small hours of the morning,” Raphael said, “slightly more scantily clad than I am now.”

“I am not sure how anything could be more scantily clad than you are right now,” said Alex. She stood back and gave him a professional once-over, and then a less professional two-or-three-times over. Raphael grinned. He had that effect on people. “More blood?” she asked.

“Too much blood,” he said. “You’re missing the point. The blood is not supposed to be fearsome. It’s supposed to outline my best features and indicate the hidden ones.”

“ _What_ hidden ones?” Alex asked. Raphael beamed. Everything was a success.

“Given that all my features are best features, anything you cannot currently see is a hidden treasure," he said.

“Is that why you insist on wearing as little as possible?”

“No, that’s for Art,” Raphael said.

Alex considered this. “So that image that was circling a while ago - it wasn’t faked? You do know each other?”

The picture had actually been the reason she had met Raphael. She had still been casually stalking Art at the time - not obsessed, as she had been as a teenager, but - well, less wistful than appreciative. Most pictures of Art had him scowling in some sort of heavy field gear. Then all of a sudden the Picture had come to light, and while the internet distracted itself figuring out how it had been photoshopped, Alex had set off to meet the man who, according to all rumor, dressed like David Bowie in a strip club every day of the week. Somewhere along the way she had managed to get enrolled in a costuming program, and he had acquired a sense of restraint. Or he had until he got the idea of avenging himself by dressing up as a low-budget porno version of Art.

“He was rude enough to stop in on his way back from some sort of mission,” Raphael said. “It was apparently the sort of mission that makes short work of one’s clothes. Really, they should have let me handle that."

“They probably figured out that the thought of losing your precious satin would have you on the floor in the fetal position.”

“True - or it would be if I hadn’t outgrown the satin.”

“You were wearing satin weeks ago!”

“I grow quickly.” Raphael took one last, admiring look in the mirror and decided he was ready to go. He offered Alex his hand. “Don’t you have a costume?”

“Can’t you tell? I’m a shepherdess. I’m herding you.”

“Excellent. I just hope you don’t get tired of telling people so.”

He held the door for her like a proper gentleman, which was disconcerting given what he looked like at the moment. Outside, in the streetlights, he was if anything only more alluring, most of him gleaming darkly and promising more while the fake blood glittered in the streetlights. With anyone else, Alex would be trying not to look too closely, but Raphael only preened when he caught people looking, regardless of who or what he wore.

"Are you really planning to come with me?” Raphael asked, hesitating near the lighted circle of a street lamp.

“No,” Alex said firmly. “I’ve got plans with friends. With any luck, we won’t see each other until morning.”

“Dull. You’ll make sure he sees it?”

“There will be pictures all over the internet!”

“Darling. Do you really think Art reads the internet? I’m not sure he knows it exists. His intel files just appear in his hands.”

Alex winced. “I’ll make sure he sees them,” she promised.

“Thank you,” said Raphael, soft and earnest, and Alex turned and walked away quickly before she found out where soft and earnest took her.


	9. Shopping

Emrys did try to give his wards pocket money, they just didn’t seem to do anything with it.

* * *

 

Art, at least, had a reasonable excuse. He was saving up for something; Emrys merely made the excuse of asking what, and was not sure whether he was more horrified that the answer was weaponry, or that an eight-year-old could talk for a full hour about the relative benefits of various firearms.

“You do realize that you would be provided with anything you might need in the eventual, hypothetical... eventuality that you were sent on a mission?” Emrys asked. Art shrugged and nodded.

“Yes, but this one would be mine,” he said. Emrys had lost track of what exactly he was planning on buying somewhere in the delude of information.

“Don’t you want something... else?” Emrys asked. “Something... personal?”

Art looked blank. After a moment, it seemed to dawn on him that Emrys was looking for something along the lines of what his supposed peers coveted. His face slowly started to brighten, less with anticipation than with understanding. “A... pocket knife?” he guessed. Emrys supposed that would have to do.

Maeve, when she joined them, was hardly less confusing. Her money at least seemed to disappear, but it never went anywhere; she never seemed to own anything, or have any desire to. Emrys had offered her a butterfly wall hanging in much the same way he had optimistically taken Art to see a superhero movie, and she hung it on her wall in much the same way Art had stood the requisite action figure on his dresser. Emrys suspected that in a few months he would find it fallen underneath her dresser, its absence completely unnoticed, just as he had found Art’s figurine.

He mentioned this apparent paradox to Luigi some time after he was entrusted with a third strange, awkward child. Luigi soothed his soul somewhat - he took his vacations gladly, disappeared into electronics stores, and came out with a tangle of cables and strange twisting gadgets that no one else could identify, but which had come out to cost the exact value of his allowance to the penny. Perhaps that was why he made the mistake of confessing to him, as if he were a normal person, that he had been completely unable to discover the cause of Maeve’s apparent insolvency.

“Oh, she’s bribing public officials,” Luigi said.

“What? She’s  _twelve!”_

“And she’s been at it for years. I can show you the records.”

After that, Emrys stopped questioning his wards’ purchases. They did as they pleased; attempts to interfere with them outside of training regimens were met with blank stares and, often enough, complete disregard. He was merely fortunate that they were, on the whole, well-behaved.

And then, after Art had graduated and Maeve’s trials were fast approaching, there was Raphael. A blessedly normal child after the last three. Money ran through his hands like water, vanishing in a day replaced by sweets, matchbox cars, and every other sort of brightly colored plastic that was marketed to children, all scattered carelessly about his room to an extent that regularly required shouting to get cleared to the edges. Emrys could do that; it was not like these were his first charges.

After the last three, though, he elected to ignore abnormalities like the way sweets didn’t  _stop_ running through Raphael’s hands well after his pocket money had vanished.

\---

The first thing Art did after finding Emrys dead of a heart attack in his chair in the living room was knock on Linguini’s door. Linguini, answering, looked as if he had not yet been to bed, and the moment he saw Art he looked mortified and started running fingers through his overlong hair.

“Come on,” Art said. “Emrys is dead, we’re going shopping.”

“Can I just...” Linguini looked back into his room. “Change clothes first?”

“Can you change clothes while you rearrange his appointments for the day?” Art asked. Linguini shrugged and closed the door on him.

When he emerged again, he was wearing a much nicer shirt, a more lucid expression, and his hair had been combed flat into its customary position lying low across his eyes. He looked up at Art through it and blinked a few times.

“That’s handled then,” he said. “No one need ever know he’s dead.”

“Good,” said Art, and marched him past the corpse and out the door.

Linguini sometimes staged a mental debate over whether Art had ever graced the door of the DMV - certainly he had never seen Art’s license, and he made a special effort to preserve Art’s privacy - but whether or not Art had one, he did have a dirty pickup truck of the sort that had two hefty virtues: It continued to run no matter what Art put it through, and it had enough space to pack a small tent, a backpack, and all the weaponry Art could carry. Linguini, an intrusion on this space, found himself wedged between the tent poles and the stock of a weapon he had no idea how to identify. It was black.

“Is there some reason you needed to go shopping today?” Linguini asked as the truck jolted down the road. “Before breakfast?”

“Emrys has been blocking my application to buy -” Art glanced at his audience, who was carefully levering a detached muzzle to the side with one finger “- a gun for three years. He can’t do it while he’s dead. Once Maeve gets up the whole gig is done.”

“You could have asked me to handle the paperwork,” Linguini said. “I’d have gotten it out of the way in no time.”

“It was a personal thing with the dealer,” Art said.

“Ah.” Linguini clung to the seat as Art swerved to hit an extra rock in the road. “Raphael -”

“You really think an arms dealer is going to listen to an eleven-year-old?”

“He listened to you when you were eleven.”

“I sat quiet and listened to what I was told,” Art said, which Linguini suspected was a blatant lie.

“So now there’s nothing in the way you brought me along as... team bonding?” Linguini suggested. Art snorted.

“There is no epoxy on this planet that would make me bond with you,” he said. “I need someone to keep an eye on the front of the shop while I’m busy in case this guy tries anything.”

‘I thought he was a friend of Emrys’s?”

“I realize you may think of Emrys as a charming old man who takes in orphans as a hobby,” Art said, “but he did also raise us to be special forces killing machines, and yes, you count as a killing machine, due to someone’s woefully inadequate evaluation of how you spend your time. He’s been doing it for years, and before that he had his own life and his own unsavory contacts, one of whom I am going to buy a gun from.”

“Raphael and I aren’t orphans.”

“Oh yes? And when was the last time you spoke to your much-touted brothers?” Art asked. “Or, I forget, was there a father in there somewhere? Perhaps some other parent, what are they called again...”

“I get it,” Linguini snapped, and turned his face to the window. Art supposed he may have been a bit fierce. Linguini was simply too easy to break, and he never toughened up in the slightest. “You don’t have to speak to me if you don’t want to.”

“Just do as you’re told and we can be back in perfect time for Maeve to tell you what to do,” Art said.

[unfinished]


	10. Out with Friends

“Friends,” Maeve announced, barging into Art’s room as she was wont to do. Art looked up from polishing one of his knives.

“What?”

“Friends. People have them.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you should. We both should. We should go out and get them.”

Art stared at her, a tiny ball of something that was probably best classified as fury even though there was no actual anger involved. People tended to avoid Maeve, not because they didn’t like her - they hadn’t known her for long enough to have an opinion - but because the sheer force of her determination tended to overwhelm them. Maeve had opinions about everything, and a way of turning her opinions into fact regardless of what other people thought about them.

“Nope,” he said. “You’re on your own for this one.”

“I am not,” Maeve said. “We’re a team. We work together.”

“You’re a team,” Art said. “I told you, I’m sitting this one out. Are you listening, or do I pin you to the floor?”

Maeve lifted her chin. “When we have more wardmates,” she said, turning on her heel so she could sweep back out the door, “they will do as they’re told.”

Art shrugged and went back to his task.

\---

Twenty years later, with a significant portion of her life’s work accomplished, Maeve looked about her salon, populated with the most influential people on the planet, and considered the fact that she still had no friends.

She had, of course, learned to tone it down a bit. She exchanged enough pleasantries that the force of her willpower did not knock people over like the shockwave from some unidentified explosion they were only glad not to have been closer to. For those who considered themselves her inner circle, she was more like a sharp drop, something it would be dangerous or deadly to play with, and so they liked to stand at the edge and look over, or cast stones into the depths.

She had hangers-on, and she strung them along because they still had something she wanted. Most of them were aware of this; Maeve liked to support honesty and self-awareness among her followers, because in principle she might drop dead at any moment and they needed to be prepared to take the reigns. She refused to have a delusional successor.

Some of them were... difficult. Like this gentleman who was calling himself Arras, a ridiculous name for a man who controlled so significant a portion of his country’s politics, and who probably referred to her as a shining flame when she was not around.

“I don’t want to do this in public,” she said. “Are you asking me on a date?”

“I realize it is -”

“I realize we have met privately on multiple occasions. I want to be sure you are not harboring any misconceptions about them,” Maeve said. “Those were business meetings, and I am interested in you as a political partner. If you wish to have an assignation, I require you to say so in the invitation. Failure to do so is a breach of my trust.”

Her tongue clicked over the last consonant. She watched Arras fumble for his composure, without really listening to what he had to say. It would hardly be original; she merely had to wait for him to draw breath.

“I hope you are not implying that this would be rude,” she said. “I am sure you are not implying it would be a scandal. I disapprove of scandals.”

She only let him get a few words in this time, before she interrupted to say that regardless of the nature of his intentions, he had better be clearer with his offers in future. Explicitly so, and not merely in her presence. He was convenient, but not irreplaceable. No one in her salon was irreplaceable, herself included, and she endeavored to make sure they all knew it. Arras, poor tiny child, was in some ways merely a reminder to the rest of them.

Judging by the response to her comments, they had also forgotten that she was married again. Ah well. Time to dig Linguini out of his hole and trot him around again. At least she didn’t need him for intimidation purposes this time. He never loomed well enough to suit her.


	11. Things to Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and what's to come

10 - With animal ears - Linguini. Completely oblivious to them.  
11 - Wearing kigurumis - Raphael.  
12 - Making out - Maeve, maybe?  
13 - Eating icecream - Art. Definitely Art. Alone.  
14 - Genderswapped - please to change literally nothing.  
15 - In a different clothing style (Visual Kei, gyaru, lolita, ect.) - Raphael in lolita?  
16 - During their morning ritual(s)  
17 - Spooning - silverware, probably  
18 - Doing something together (this can be anything from watching tv to having sex. Just remember to tag appropriately.)  
20 - Dancing - Linguini, same night. He can't dance. Maeve can.  
21 - Cooking/baking - Maeve and Raphael are the only ones who can cook properly. Art does a mean campfire. Linguini hopes it doesn't turn green and move.  
22 - In battle, side-by-side - ??? why would you do that to them. It's what they were supposed to do. It never worked.  
23 - Arguing - No problem!  
24 - Making up afterwards  
25 - Gazing into each others’ eyes - this run of three is probably same event.  
26 - Getting married - well, we know who that's going to be  
27 - On one of their birthdays - do they even know when their birthdays are?  
28 - Doing something ridiculous - Linguini with his bangs, perhaps?  
29 - Doing something sweet - Art. Art's the only sweet one. Raphael is when it suits him, I'm not sure Maeve knows how.  
30 - Doing something hot (once again, be sure to tag if you make it extremely NSFW!) - Art picking on Raphael. Summer. Exercise outdoors. Art is terrible.


	12. In formal clothing

 

Of course everyone knew Maeve Porta was married. It was just easy to forget that fact. Mr. Porta, whatever his first name was, rarely made an appearance in any society, with or without Maeve, and people tended to forget him until he suddenly appeared at some function, at which point the rumors would start circulating again.

Mr. Porta, for all his apparent harmless antisociality, was not safe. Maeve Porta would prosecute you under the full extent of every law ever invented by human kind; Mr. Porta would make you disappear. They said he could suck the soul out of your body and leave a husk wandering around for decades later, until the bones rotted into the soil. The one person who had ever crossed him had never been heard from again.

Good, modern-thinking people did not believe such rumors, of course. There was no way to create a sort of zombie out of someone, and if he made anyone disappear, well, they had full faith that Maeve would at least make sure there were records showing he’d done it. But the sort of person who hung around Maeve for any appreciable length of time was the sort of person who liked to court danger, and so at any function Maeve forced him to attend, there was always some small group of people clustered around Linguini, offering to fetch him enough champagne to make him forget he had ever been here.

Linguini, packed into a suit fine enough to make him, if not actually the belle of the ball, at least something respectable enough to be married to Maeve, tolerated it. He did not object to the clothes. He did not object to the champagne. He did not even, in principle, object to the company. He was sure these people had to exist, and he supposed he was glad they did so, in their own inefficient ways. They just made him nervous, in the same way tiny abandoned puppies or small children made other people nervous. He worried he might break them, and so he made an effort to say as absolutely little as possible.

It seemed to be adding to his mystique.

“Tell me about your work,” one of them asked, since his work seemed to be the only thing Linguini ever did. Linguini shrugged. “I understand you are a scientist?”

“Something along those lines,” Linguini agreed.

“What projects are you working on?”

“Biological ones. I don’t talk about my work.”

“Perhaps in the abstract?” his questioner suggested. “I promise you, I wouldn’t understand it even if you told me. I’m quite safe that way.”

“How fortunate for you.”

“Well,” said someone else, leaning forward, “perhaps you could tell us something even vaguer - like, do you lean toward the physical side of science, or the metaphysical?”

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Linguini informed this ‘newcomer’, who had been hanging around for some time looking for an opportunity such as this. “The world you’re looking for is ‘theoretical’.”

“Ah, excuse me twice over, then. My name is Arras.” Arras, it seemed, had been privy to the event planning, for he had matched his costume to the theme of the party, which seemed to be pink. Specifically, a pink just light enough to emulate a rather idealized view of a corpse. “I was in fact wondering about the metaphysical, though, Mr. Porta. Questions of knowledge, or of identity. Or - do you believe in souls, Mr. Porta?”

“So far as I am aware, the term has never been sufficiently well-defined for anyone to have an opinion on the matter,” Linguini said. “That they still do is indicative of the quality of the human race.”

“Oh, defining a soul is quite easy,” said a third man, who had not been part of the original discussion but had paused in passing. He was the leader of a rather large church, and so the subject had personal relevance; Maeve had collected him rather as one collects bugs, though Linguini was not willing to hazard a guess about the nature of either the pin or the card in question for the collection of this particular specimen. “That is - but you don’t believe in God, do you, Mr. Porta?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Arras.

“It’s only - well, he’s never been seen in any church,” said the clergyman.

“That does not eliminate the possibility of belief,” said Arras. “Mr. Porta is well known to be a very private person.  _Do_ you believe in God, Mr. Porta?”

Maeve, across the room, looked up, though she could not have said why. There was nothing unusual about the situation; Linguini was surrounded by influential people, looking, as he always did, harassed. Except that as she looked, he seemed to abruptly stiffen, and Maeve realized there was quite suddenly a chance that not everyone would leave this room with their identity intact. She began rather hastily to excuse herself from her current conversational ring.

“I find it difficult to deny their existence,” Linguini said, not quite entirely through his teeth.

“But if you have never been in a place of worship -”

“The gods I hypothesize, sir, are not the sort that one would wish to acknowledge, much less worship,” Linguini said stiffly, his voice stiff and swift. “If you will excuse me. I will leave this company before anything worse comes of it.”

He swiveled on one heel and met Maeve coming the other direction. Anyone at the party could have seen them meet almost in the center of the room, Linguini brushing angrily against Maeve’s shoulder, Maeve stopping him, and Linguini moving abruptly to seize her arm; no one seemed to have been close enough to hear what they said to each other, though several people swore their lips had not moved. Whatever the case, Maeve seemed to come off worst from it, which was a sufficiently unprecedented event to have made Linguini’s reputation in its own right.

Linguini left the party. By the end of the night, enormously impressed by that one, brief confrontation, half of the attendees were convinced that he worshipped Satan and spent his time in a dungeon attempting to conjure demons; they were more divided on the question of whether he had succeeded. On the whole, worse things could have come of it; Maeve politely banned the discussion of gods in front of her husband, and by the time he made his next appearance, most people had so completely forgotten the declaration that they did not think to test it.


End file.
